Overview of the SPBM Policies You Can Use to Manage Your vSAN

In this next blog in the SPBM series, we are going to focus on vSAN. With vSAN, the SPBM policies have quite a bit of functionality. You may wonder how all these rules or capabilities are used. They can control data placement and protection, how data is placed to tolerate a host failure, IO and site DR tolerance. In this episode, at the risk turning this blog into a white paper and end up being too long, I’m just going to review the available SPBM capabilities for vSAN. To learn more about each capability or rule, please see the links below.

With vSAN and SPBM, many of the policies have to do with how data is managed across the vSAN. Where and how VM disks or data is placed across physical sites in a stretched cluster, vSAN nodes, disk groups on a node, and physical disks within a disk group. This allows you to tailor individual policies based on specific application or organizational requirements, enabling granular management at a VM or disks level. Some of the options, to be able to utilize them, have node count, disk type, or cluster configuration requirements. Rules such as Flash read cache reservation would only apply to a hybrid vSAN and is not typically used unless there may be a specific application performance issue. To utilize dedupe and compression, you must have an all-flash vSAN.

The most common rule used is Failures to Tolerate or FTT. This determines what RAID method is used to be able to tolerate host, disk group or disk failures. Regardless of the rules, make sure when enabling features or rules, you understand the configuration and possible space requirements for those capabilities.

Here's a short video reviewing the different SPBM rules available for vSAN.